The Fight Against Contraception Has Taken A Hip New Turn

This isn’t your grandfather’s fight against contraception. Don’t assume that Foster Friess will show up suggesting women throw some aspirin between their knees. Although this group shares Friess’s disapproval of the use of birth control. But they do so with much better graphics.

1Flesh is the newest player in the fight against contraception of any kind. Not just hormonal birth control, which some people believe is an “abortifacient” that could prevent fertilized eggs from implanting on a woman’s uterine wall. Not just the morning after pill, which many still find inexplicably controversial. This group of young people is against contraception of any kind. Here’s their reasoning.

If anything can be said of our generation, it’s this: We want sexy back. Our parent’s generation, well, they lost it. They delivered to us a world with sky-high rates of divorce, abortion, and STDs; a world bored with sex and bored with romance; a world in which more and more people are turning to pornography to find sexual satisfaction; a world in which 1 in 5 women report being sexual assaulted, and the human body — the sexiest thing in the universe — is used to sell cars.

After extremely little consideration, we decided we don’t want that. We want awesome marriages and mind-blowing sex lives. We want women and men to be respected and loved for who they are, to the very depths of their being. We want sex free from fear, love free from use, and a world of people who love and respect their own bodies. In short, we want sexy back. In fact, we demand it.

So we got together — a group of college kids — to find the root of this mentality. (aka what the hell happened!?) Well, though any cultural change contains all sorts of contributing factors, we think we’ve narrowed all the wackness down to its primary cause: The widespread use of artificial contraception.

It sounds cool, doesn’t it? Young people wanting their sexy back and all that. Who doesn’t love a little JT? And they have a point that divorce rates are high and there are a lot of STD’s running around out there. Sexual assault is scary and it happens frighteningly often. Women’s bodies are sexualized to sell absolutely anything nowadays, that’s always frustrating. These are all problems that I can understand why young people are upset about.

Except they all come from… not getting pregnant? Really?

There are a million things wrong with these arguments. In fact, it would take a really long time to point them all out. There’s the fact that in essence, this is a well marketed abstinence-only, natural family planning campaign. It ignores that not every individual wants to make a lifelong commitment to their romantic partners. In fact for some, that would be the opposite of sexy.

It should be pointed out that so much of this program is based on hand-picked, misrepresented, sometimes downright false facts, which a blogger for Patheos does an amazing job of explaining. It suggests everyone use natural family planning, a system that makes sex off limits during parts of the month and can be a little tricky for some couples to figure out and track effectively.

This is an catchy campaign. It’s obviously aimed at young people and it does a decent job of making witty side-by-side observations and pretending that makes them related. And that’s why misinformation like this is so dangerous.

I would love for 1flesh to explain to me how contraception has caused sexual assault. I want them to tell me how condoms or birth control convince criminals to force themselves onto other human beings, to take away another person’s choice of sexual partner or activity. How exactly do condoms and birth control manage to do something that’s been happening since before they were invented?

Obviously, the horrible sexual assault claims aren’t the only falsehoods asserted by this campaign. The idea that family planning is hurting women instead of empowering them is ridiculous. The thought that our cultural ills will all be solved if we just move backwards to the repressed time of our past is mind-numbingly nonsensical. And yet, there it is. Brightly colored and packaged in clever graphics. It’s trendy wrapping paper on a stale argument.